Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.21

1.21

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The shower felt... weird.

For the parts of my body that were covered in feathers, it didn’t really feel like anything. My down feathers provided a layer that kept the water from my skin entirely. I felt the droplets hit my feathers and then either bounce off or run down the barbs before falling off.

For the parts of my body that weren’t covered by feathers, though, it was... well, a mix between something approaching normal and something very distinctly not normal. My stomach, sternum, and neck were the former. My forearms and lower legs were definitely the latter.

The podotheca that covered both was an odd mix of sensitive and not. I could feel the temperature through it, but it was even more distant than the rest of my skin. It was thicker than normal skin, and tougher, too.

This wasn’t saying much, because my ‘normal’ skin was absurdly tough.

Between all three states, it was strange to be covered by water

Perhaps it was a bit of irony, but my feathers handled it the best.

My feathers were covered completely in a substance that seemed nearly utterly immune to things sticking to it. From water to particulate, the only way for things to get stuck in my feathers was for them to get lucky and get trapped between barbs by the forces they exerted.

It wasn’t quite an oil. It didn’t rub off on seemingly anything other than the barbs of my own feathers, not my skin or my podotheca.

It wasn’t even engineered. Chozo had evolved this.

Still, where the detritus could get, the water could also get. And, where my feather’s coating was immune to everything, the detritus wasn’t. The water added weight and force, and dragged it all out of place. My skin and podotheca weren’t so fortunate, but all the detritus that I’d gathered still washed away with a bit of effort.

By the time I’d finished up in the shower, the nanites had finished cleaning up my clothes. Every last speck of dust that had managed to worm its way onto them had been cleansed.

Drying off was a simple matter of standing in front of a fan blowing hot air for a few minutes, and once that was done, I redressed in the entire ensemble.

And then I got right back to work.

The first thing on my list of things to do was to add a ton of new tasks to the queue for the Nanofactories. I wanted to do a fair amount of excavation, and what I was planning was going to take the things at least a couple of hours, so they would stay busy while I went to do other things.

The second thing on my list was to make myself some breakfast. I chose to do a bit of pork, in the form of both sausages and bacon, on a skillet, mixed with a few other ingredients, as well as the obligatory herbs and spices. I found myself running unfortunately low on garlic, so I couldn’t add as much as I wanted, but ultimately, it still ended up tasting great.

The third thing on my list, funnily enough, was still food-related. However, I had no intentions of eating for this step.

I had a nice little laboratory setup now, after all, and there was a reason I had gone to get such a wide variety of foodstuffs for my collection, and only part of that was eating.

The entire setup came to life with a thought, and I started to grab small containers, vials, and trays.

While I’m sure that Continental Brands and Biotechnica would like it to be otherwise, the truth is that, in the vast, vast majority of foodstuffs, even after processing, DNA still survives in the food. It can be damaged, and it can be incomplete, but it’s still there.

I set the trays down on the countertop, and then opened up the fridge. I wasted no time in quickly grabbing samples of each piece of meat, every vegetable and fruit, each sauce, every herb and spice... everything. I put each and every single sample in their own little container, their own little vial, their own little tray.

Extracting usable and valid DNA samples from all of this could have been a long, involved, and annoying process... but I already had nanotech.

And, quite frankly, that took the vast majority of the effort out of it.

I brought it all over to the Biovat, and then took a seat in the chair in front of it.

It took me all of two hours to render them down into something usable. Most of that time was spent going over each individual item, each individual DNA sample, and spending a bit of time seeing how much of it had been damaged, how much of it had been altered, and how much of it had been contaminated.

There was quite a bit of the second, I found. The Corporate Wars had led to a lot of damage being done to the ecosystem through bioweapons, climate change, and habitat destruction. Biotechnica had been doing this thing where they were ‘trying to save the planet’ for something like fifty years at this point, but the truth of the matter was that this had only further diluted the surviving genestock through artificial creations that had since started to outdo the originals.

Undoing that would have been a long, involved, and annoying process... but I was a fucking Chozo. This kind of genetic mucking-about amounted to child’s play- it was literally child’s play, as a matter of fact. My Chozo half had once taught things more advanced than this to hatchlings.

Combine that with my Supernatural Bullshit, and it took much less time than it otherwise might have to divine the original forms of the DNA, and thus, by the time I was finished, I had an entire library of genetic sequences that I would be able to reproduce at my leisure.

I was almost certainly going to, but that would be a project for later.

A quick glance through the city’s Data Pools to find the local weather forecast told me everything I needed to know about the storm that was still incoming. I had until five in the afternoon before it hit the city in full, and that meant that I needed to get started on a few things.

First, I had to find a spot where I could go flying... And, perhaps, accomplish some other goals while I was at it.

I hummed, and flicked through the navigation again. Night City’s main page, navigation subsection... And there we go, satellite pictures.

Despite the three fusion reactors and the synthesiser, most of my material output was spent on relatively ordinary elements. Rarer, and more valuable, elements, were being produced, but if I could acquire a decent supply of them, I’d save myself a lot of time spent waiting.

All I needed was metal, and a lot of it.

Fortunately, there were more than a few places where I could get an abundance of it.

During the DataKrash, things had been, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. This applied to pretty much everything and everyone, and one the consequences of that, coupled with the aftereffects of the nuking and the Time Of The Red in general, had been that several aerial transports had ended up crashing in different places around the city. The largest of these aerial vehicles were called Aerozeps, which, for all intents and purposes, was effectively a flying cargo ship. A lot of them had belonged to DTR, Decker, Tanaka & Rogers, which was a freight corporation that moved cargo throughout the world.

The Nomads had taken over a lot of those crashed vehicles, but DTR had since rebuilt a significant proportion of their fleet, and, starting in around 2047, much of the Nomad’s excess supply of air vehicles and aerial cargo transports had seen sudden and strange... misfortunes that rendered them inoperable.

The corporate hand was obvious to everyone, but the Nomads couldn’t really do much about it, so... the status quo continued to tip further in the favour of the corporations.

I was not keen on salvaging Nomad ships, but I didn’t actually need to. There were a couple of them that had crashed and then simply never been returned to operational status in the first place.

A lot of them had already been picked over for components, but components weren’t what I was concerned with. Their hulls were just as valuable when it came to salvage for me.

The only caveat for them was that they had to be... decently far out of the city, so that I could make sure that any harvesting operations would go unnoticed during the storm, alongside my flight.

I scrolled through the map, looking for crash sites that were displayed. These satellite images were fairly recent, and so, I could be decently assured that whichever one I went for would have what I wanted.

I paused, as my eyes settled on a particular location and my Farsight metaphorically sat up and took notice.

This site was out towards the east of the city, crashed past the Laguna Reservoir, smack-dab in the middle of the absolutely nowhere. Arid desert all around it, with old tracks that led to and from it that told me it had already been salvaged more than a few times, so there should be no real attention lingering on it...

A perfect target for me, in other words.

Well, that’s one matter decided.

The second thing I would need to do would be to get new clothes for my soon-to-be flight. My current setup was insufficient to make clothes of the same quality as my current set, but I didn’t need to thread Essence with normal matter to make something that was good enough for what I wanted.

I leaned back in my chair, and summoned another screen.

A breathing mask was the first thing that I designed. The acid rain, radioactive dust, and corrosive particulate wouldn’t be enough to harm me, my biological processes sufficient to obliterate them, but I didn’t really feel like breathing it in the first place.

This was a long-solved problem, though, so I spent more time on the aesthetics of the mask than I did on its actual functionality. The moment it was done, I tossed it straight into the construction queue for the Nanofactories, and then moved onto the next.

General clothes came next, but unlike the mask, I found myself immediately stuck on what to wear. This was one thing that both of my halves had in common; both had been wearing the exact same style of clothing for more than half their lives. Fashion usually took a back-seat to comfort, though my Chozo half had the weight of ceremony and the advantage that fancy clothes were no less comfortable than anything else.

I hummed, crossing my arms and slipping them through both of my wide sleeves.

I was going to have to ditch the robes. Too fluttery. I could make it work, and my Chozo half had made it work before, but it was a lot more effort than it needed to be. The only other contexts for flight I had were when I was wearing only my undersuit, which was also out because that would get me covered by dirt and worse, and... when my Chozo half was still wearing armour.

My humming shifted in tune as I considered that thought.

I did miss my armour. It had been a long time indeed since my Chozo half had worn armour and picked up a weapon. The ancient War Glaive that had once been a symbol of achievement had been interred on Ili Sylpha Nalima alongside the Power Armour as part of the shift away from the time of the Empire, and ever since, nothing else had ever felt as proper. What few times my Chozo half had engaged in combat had been done with other weaponry, and each time had left that part of me more and more determined to not engage unless it was necessary.

And yet... With the benefit of hindsight and experience, the decision did now seem hasty. A rejection of what had once been in favour of what could be, a choice made when that part of me had been too young and too foolish to reconcile the differences.

Time has since granted that part of me wisdom.

I could not remake my old armour, and with these tools, I wouldn’t even try.

But, perhaps, it was time to start returning to my roots, and apply all the things that had been learned since then.

I pulled my arms apart, and got to work.